Défaire le discours d’autorité Les physiologies à la limite de l’essai

Neither their political stand against the July Monarchy nor their inscription in the European context of scientific vulgarisation is sufficient to link Parisian Physiologies of the 1840s to the prose of ideas. These studies of manners, akin to the satirical press, subvert their own cognitive structures and produce a parodic and off-kilter form of knowledge which appeals to the creative and anti-ideological dimension allowed for by the generic indeterminacy of the essay.